Hurt

Twitter and Facebook have a lot to answer for. They’ve ruined the art of the put down.

My calling for more insults may sound strange in a week when journalist Alison Pearson reported an unknown comedian named Doug Stanhope for abusing her on Twitter, Radio presenter Richard Bacon told police of an internet troll who insulted him, and former footballer Stan Collymore watched Joshua Cryer get sentenced to 240 hours of community work for comments posted.

But I’m talking about the proper insult, one which leaves the recipient admiring his assailant for inventiveness, ingenuity and cleverness. Pearson’s abuser posted that he hoped her kids would get tetraplegia, Bacon’s stalker insulted his wife and infant son while fantasising about Bacon’s death, and Collymore’s opponent simply posted a vomitarium of racial slurs. Hardly clever, ingenious or inventive, and certainly not designed to leave anyone in admiration.

I’m not sure if it’s the fact that people who insult others on digital media tend to have nine fingers more than their total number of brain cells and therefore type nine words for every time they actually engage their thinking gear, or whether they just spend too much time on their own congratulating themselves on their sense of humour.

If digital trolls had any social contact whatsoever, people would instantly tell them that drawing beards on photos of ladies and boobs on pictures of men doesn’t really make you a comedian, no matter what Stanhope’s agent tells him. Guessing what other trolls have had to eat over the past few weeks, by looking at their stained clothes and matted beards, may pass for entertainment at the open source computer code writers’ weekly forum in the church hall but the rest of the world just doesn’t get it. You’re not funny, OK?

None of the people mentioned above will find themselves quoted in years to come as being the source of great new invective. None will be held up as a new Oscar Wilde.

One of my favourite insults was written many years ago when someone who talked a load of rubbish was described as being “an alimentary canal with a sphincter at both ends.” What a fantastic way to say “you talk sh*t”. It’s inventive, snappy and funny. When was the last time you found that level of insult on Facebook? We seem to have lost the art of the funny put down.

When I was younger, much, much younger, I once tried chatting up a girl at Glasgow University’s student disco. I must have been completely hopeless and persistent because I’ve always remembered her reply when I asked if I could drive her home. “No thanks, I’d be scared if you put your head out the window we’d be arrested for mooning.” Now, admit it, that’s clever. It may have been the only put down she had, she may have stolen it and she may have used it hundreds of times, but I smiled at her originality - if not her taste in men.

Churchill was brilliant at inventive put downs. My favourite of his is “He’s a modest little person with much to be modest about.”

Many special put downs have become clichés and old hat but were original once upon a time. “He’s a self made man and worships his creator” may sound dated now but when John Bright first coined it I hope people cheered. Groucho Marx again deserved applause for “I’ve had a great evening, but this wasn’t it.”

But perhaps the best insults come when two original thinkers come together. When George Bernard Shaw insulted Winston Churchill he wrote “I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my play. Bring a friend....if you have one”. Churchill wrote back “Can’t attend first night, will attend second....if there is one.”

So, set beside these legends in the art of the insult, today’s internet offence geeks are neither big nor clever. They’re small, very small, and missing something in their make up. Many people are now deserting Twitter and Facebook because of these nasty, weak, emotionally cadaverous zombies who are wordsmiths only in their own imagination.

I think that social media arrived just about a hundred years too late. Oscar Wilde, Winston Churchill and the rest would have had a ball.